Toronto: Here's good news for those suffering from fatty liver disease - pure maple syrup is likely to boost your liver, new research suggests.

Keiko Abe of the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences conducted the pilot study on rats.

Lab rats fed on a diet with some pure maple syrup yielded much better results in liver function tests than the control groups, the journal Bioscience, Biotechnology and Biochemistry reports.

"It is important to understand the factors leading to impaired liver function - our lifestyle choices including poor diet, stress and lack of exercise," says Melissa Palmer, clinical professor in hepatology at New York University Plainview.

"The preliminary results...are encouraging and emphasize the importance of choosing a healthy diet to help counteract the lifestyle and environmental factors that may impact liver function, even our choice of a sweetener," adds Palmer, according to a university statement.

Liver health is of utmost importance because of the hundreds of vital functions it performs that are essential to human life.

Some of them include storing energy (glycogen), regulating blood glucose, the production of certain amino acids (building blocks of protein) and filtering harmful substances from the blood.